Hatfield has last laugh on Thatcher.

bo_drinker

25 years on Hayfield has last laugh on Thatchers New era dawns for a community the Tories wrecked.
25 years after the notorious Hatfield pit strike the community has the last laugh on Margaret Thatcher

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EXCLUSIVE by Dennis Ellam 21/02/2009

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bo_drinker

New era dawns for community Tories wrecked.

25 years after the notorious Hatfield pit strike the community has the last laugh on Margaret Thatcher

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EXCLUSIVE by Dennis Ellam 21/02/2009

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The morning shift comes up into the daylight... Mick Barnes and his mates, once again, are doing what they do best.
The miners are back. The tough, proud men of coal. A quarter of a century after the bitter strike that nearly finished it off, their industry is ready to stage a remarkable revival.
“None of us would ever have predicted this,” says Mick, 47, after he’s scrubbed away the dust and grime from eight hours underground.
“Did the miners lose the strike? Yes, we did, to be honest. We took on Margaret Thatcher and the might of the Tory Government, and we lost. But look what’s happening now. In the end, we’re the ones having the last laugh, Maggie.”
Mick is one of 360 miners working half-a-mile below the South Yorkshire countryside at Hatfield Colliery, near Doncaster, where there’s enough coal to take the pit into another era.
Under plans announced by the Government this month, an updated Hatfield Main will provide the fuel for a new breed of carbon-friendly power stations – linked directly to one that will be built next door by 2014, at a cost of £1 billion.
Jobs should be assured for decades. The seam they are mining now could last for at least 50 years. Suddenly, Mick and the rest can glimpse the flicker of a bright future.
It was March 12, 1984, when the miners’ strike began and Hatfield was one of the pits at the centre of the dispute which was to become one of the most bitter and ferocious in living memory, splitting communities almost like a civil war.
Today the old lane to the pit, where pickets and mounted police fought running battles, has been closed. New sweeping access roads have been laid, signs have already been erected to “Colliery and Power Station”, and plans have been drawn up for expensive landscaping to include – would Arthur Scargill ever have imagined it? – a Hatfield Marina.
It’s presumably where the miners of the 21st Century will moor their yachts. Richard Budge, the boss of Powerfuel, the company which now runs the colliery and will be big investors in the power station, said: “People said we were crackers to believe in coal, that we were pouring money into an industry that had been nailed into its coffin.
“But they began changing their tune when the price of coal started to double.
“Of course the unions were suspicious of me at first. They told everyone I had three heads, I would rip off the workers, take the profits and disappear. Well, I told the miners you have got two choices – it’s trust me and sign up to the new principles of this industry, or see it die completely.
“I’ve worked around coal miners all my life. I had sympathy with men fighting for their livelihood, although I think they were led into a battle they couldn’t win, Scargill versus Thatcher, taking on a Government that had a year’s supply of coal already stockpiled.
“Likewise, they know me as someone they can talk to. I’m not some remote boss sitting in a boardroom. Every couple of weeks I go underground, to meet them on their own territory, and at the end of every shift my office door is always open to any man.
“I told them, it was coal that powered the first industrial revolution. And it will be coal that fires the next – and they are a part of it.”
After it crushed the strike, a vindictive Tory government carried out its threat to decimate the industry.
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That spring of 1984, there were 170 collieries in Britain, with 191,000 working miners. Today there are 12, employing 8,000. Hatfield could have gone too. It lurched from one crisis to another and had to close down for two years, but Budge – living up to his nickname King Coal – refused to be defeated and raised another £100million to save it, mainly from a Russian backer.
The wheels on the pithead started spinning again. An iconic symbol of a working tradition, so instantly recognised that when the makers of the movie Brassed Off were looking for a backdrop, they chose Hatfield.
The colliery soccer team has reformed, although it doesn’t win much. But the colliery band has clinched a national trophy.
For the first time in a generation, teenagers are being recruited from the local schools as apprentices, to begin four-year courses that will train them in mining’s new technologies, on wages of £240 a week – more than twice what other industries were offering.
There is a mood among the miners, hardened to tough times and bad news, that King Coal might be delivering on his promises.
Derwin Martin, 47, the colliery’s surface manager, recites a list, the names of pits that used to be within 10 miles of here...Thorne, Markham Main, Askham, Edlington. And the rest, all once thriving. Now all gone. The pit villages are only just starting to recover from the damage that was inflicted on them by the closures, says Derwin, whose grandfather moved to Yorkshire from the Welsh coalfields, one of six brothers who followed their father into coal.
He has spent 30 years at Hatfield, stayed on as a maintenance worker during the closure, never lost his faith that it would prosper one day.
“We see the trains going past, to and from Immingham, bringing in coal imported from all over the world, 2.25million tons of it every year, costing more than the coal we produce ourselves,” he says. “It’s madness. The country should rely on its own resources. The public knows that. When we started up again, men came from closed-down coalfields to work here.
“Some of them had been strikers, some worked through the dispute. They might have been on opposite sides of the picket lines but it doesn’t matter any more. Those old differences have had to be laid aside and forgotten, for the sake of the future. Miners are are a breed of their own. I saw others move away from the industry but they couldn’t settle. When you’re underground you are your own man. You make your own decisions, you are responsible for yourself and your mates around you.”
Mick Barnes is cleaned up and heading for home. The eight years he endured working in an office after Dearne Valley colliery, near Barnsley, closed are just an unhappy memory now.
He served on the frontline during the strike. He was one of Scargill’s flying pickets, who travelled the country to blockade ports and confront strike-breakers, dodging squads of police mobilised against them.
“To this day, we don’t know if they were really police, more likely they were some kind of army units,” he says. “They wore no identifying numbers. They would stop our vehicles and hardly say a word, while they smashed the windscreens and the headlights, so we couldn’t go any further. That was how Maggie chose to fight the working man. When the strike was called off we marched back to work shoulder-to-shoulder, behind the colliery’s banner – the band playing and people cheering, a very emotional day.
“But we weren’t defeated. Maggie won the battle, and she looked well pleased with herself, but we went on to win the war.”
Only a few weeks ago Norman Tebbit, Thatcher’s righthand man during the 1984-85 strike admitted: “The scale of the closures went too far.” In a new book about the strike, he says: “There is no doubt that this led to a breakdown in these communities. Many were completely devastated, with people out of work turning to drugs and no real man’s work because all the jobs had gone.”
The new power station may mean an 150 extra jobs. And Budge estimates up to 1,500 could be created in shops and trades that it will need. But in the nearby village of Stainforth, they point out, Hatfield once gave work to 3,000.
And some think it will never fully recover. Painter Clive Westacott, 45, said: “Whatever happens with Hatfield, it’s over. Old communities won’t be brought back.”
news@sundaymirror.co.uk

mewbie_2

If I wanted to read a book I'd join a library.

Zagu

“Did the miners lose the strike? Yes, we did, to be honest. We took on Margaret Thatcher and the might of the Tory Government, and we lost. But look what’s happening now. In the end, we’re the ones having the last laugh, Maggie.”

I'm sure that Thatcher would be as pleased as the miners that it has become profitable again. The whole article is written as if Thatcher had some personal vendetta, but in reality it was just too expensive.

stevetodd

Zagu wrote: »

“Did the miners lose the strike? Yes, we did, .

Hang on a minute according to the documentry I saw (see link) the miners not only won the strike but Arthur Scargill personally saved the UK by preventing a nuclear power station being blown up

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6NVoUzWa2M&feature=PlayList&p=6955593FCD38C1A4&playnext=1&index=39

Rochdale_Pioneers

Zagu wrote: »

“Did the miners lose the strike? Yes, we did, to be honest. We took on Margaret Thatcher and the might of the Tory Government, and we lost. But look what’s happening now. In the end, we’re the ones having the last laugh, Maggie.”

I'm sure that Thatcher would be as pleased as the miners that it has become profitable again. The whole article is written as if Thatcher had some personal vendetta, but in reality it was just too expensive.

No, it was a vendetta. Heath took on the miners and lost. Scargill - insane demagogue though he is - was right that she planned a pit closure programme. Thatcher then turned the forces of the state on the miners and threw the rule of law out of the window.

Thats not to say that all the pits were profitable or that non of the miners were crazed communists trying to provoke a general strike. But it became very clear that many of the "unprofitable" pits were actually very profitable. RJB mining bought quite a few which turned healthy profits for a further decade.

And so here we are with 400 year supply of coal beneath our feet. We buy coal dug in Brazil which is shipped half way across the globe by boat, then a few hundred miles by train from port to power station. According to the Tories this is a more profitable solution to digging the coal up in a pit a few miles away from the power station. Mind you, once a deep pit is closed they're probably right - the cost of reopening them once the surface buildings have been swept away is prohibitive.

Cat695

Do you think she gives a rats [EMAIL="a&#64;rse"]a@rse[/EMAIL] now?

Rochdale_Pioneers

Cat695 wrote: »

Do you think she gives a rats [EMAIL="a&#64;rse"]a@rse[/EMAIL] now?

No, she's senile.

Mr_Falling_Star

I live in a pit village and it still hasn't recovered since the closure in 1991 so nice one Hatfield!

As for Thatcher (where is the vomiting smiley?) can't stand the woman, there were ways and means of winding down a industry, hers was not the kindest one

bo_drinker

:T Where is the vomiting smiley ?????????????

tomstickland

I don't really understand the "Thatcher destroyed industry" argument. Why would any PM want to reduce production output, unless something was just a way of wasting money?